Selling Online - More Strategies and Techniques For Boosting Traffic and Sales

Most business owners really don’t understand what it takes for success in selling online. It’s not just putting up a website. It can be a beautiful website, well designed with great products or services, but there’s a lot more to learn. There’s a huge learning curve in order to be successful online.

Most people put up their website and don’t have any idea how to track the metrics. The metrics are how many visitors are actually coming to their website on a daily basis.

You have to have a web log in order to get these metrics. This way you can find out where your visitors are coming from demographically, who your visitors are, what their psycho graphics are, their challenges, problems, age, income bracket, sex, and marital status

Another important key element to remember is that the title bar has to include keywords. Keywords are the words that searchers actually type into the search engine when they’re looking for your product or service. One of the first things that a Webmaster should do is their keyword research.
There are various tools that you can use to do this research. One is the Google Keyword Tool. It’s the keyword tool that Google provides for free. This is primarily used for users who are running a Google Adwords campaign, but can also be used for the organic search, which is the free search located on the left side of the search engine results page (SERP).

Another great tool is Wordtracker. There is a free version of this software but it is very limited. The paid version is very robust and will give you a lot more keyword suggestions. Another tool is Keyword Elite, which is another paid service but very effective in keyword research. This is nothing to fret about, however, because if you’re starting out with very limited resources, the Google Keyword Tool will work just fine for you.

You will also want to take a good look at your competition, which is commonly referred to as competitive analysis. You really want to know how other players, companies or websites are selling online competitively within that same niche. You want to be located on the first page of the search results to get sufficient traffic, preferably in the first three spots.

Now there’s a lot of competition vying for that first spot, but just because there’s a lot of competition doesn’t mean you should get deterred in any way. Where there’s competition, there’s money. If there’s no competition, then that can be an indication that there’s really not a lot of money to be made in particular niche.

So competition can be a good thing. When you’re faced with competition, you just have to be a better marketer and you have to take your time. If you follow along and take the right instruction from the beginning, you can compete and get your pages atop in the one to ten listing in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Google controls about 70% of the search market so you should really be more concerned about ranking your pages in Google.

One thing to remember in selling online is that the Internet is a technical vehicle. However, you still have to apply the principles of basic marketing, selling and promotion that you would offline. The Internet is just another vehicle for marketing a business and making sales as well.

All of the “old school” marketing principles such as good copy, good headlines, bullets, call to action, testimonials, guarantees and scarcity applies to the Internet as well. You want to have great customer service, include a phone number on your webpage (800 numbers are the best) and all contact information. You’ll also want to add a photo of your team or members to make people feel like they can trust you. Pictures and video establishes trust and validity.

As soon as a visitor lands on your site, most of them will land on your home page. Sometimes they will land on a category page or a product page, but we’ve found mostly that our visitors (60%) enter our site through our home page.

With this usually being the case, you want to make that page inviting and as soon as they land on the home page, you want them to know exactly what you offer and how it can benefit them in the first 5 seconds. If this doesn’t happen, they’ll more than likely hit the back button to the SERPs and visit another site that has all of these strategies in place. This is part of the game when it comes to selling online, so play to win and don't let that happen to you.

So if you’re just starting out selling online and you’re not sure of exactly what product or service you want to sell online, just make sure that whatever it is has a good amount of search volume. Look for 10,000 searches a month, 5,000 or a little less than that. Keywords with less search volume can add up.